After Millions Spent, Staten Island’s Deer Vasectomy Program Might be Paying Off

I’ll admit it. When I first wrote about this program after it was introduced back in 2017, I was a skeptic. In a world where hunters are lining up for the opportunity to shoot a deer and head home with some meat, we’re going to allocate millions of dollars in an attempt to perform vasectomies on captured bucks?

Honestly, I still believe it to be a bunch of bullsh*t for the most part.

But, being as open-minded as I possibly can, I remain all-ears. And in the case of Staten Island’s vasectomy program, I have, at least so far, been kinda-sorta proven wrong. 

My honest assumption was that I half expected this thing to run out of money after a couple of seasons, but here we are. In an announcement made earlier this week, New York City’s Parks Department has extended its contract with White Buffalo Inc., the Connecticut-based outfit that has run the local deer vasectomy program since 2016. The new contract is set to run until September 2029 with an associated cost of nearly $2.5 million. And the good news is, according to the data, the program seems to be working.

According to city data published last fall, the local whitetail population is on the decline since the vasectomy program began. Currently estimated at 1,273 deer, the population is down by over 40 percent since the program’s inception. In addition to population estimates declining, the data suggests that deer-vehicle collisions on the island have decreased at a whopping rate of 60 percent as well.

“White Buffalo is a leading expert in population control of white-tailed deer and has extensive experience using fertility control,” Parks Chief of Education and Wildlife Sarah Aucoin said. “This new sterilization contract will ensure that we maintain a high level of vasectomized bucks on Staten Island and continue to see the overall population of deer, and the impacts of deer, decrease.”

Despite White Buffalo ending up missing on their aggressive targets through the first few years of their contract, Staten Island stuck with the program and has seemingly won the battle against overpopulation in some respects.

While I still believe that a small group of trained hunters could have easily knocked this off for a few 6-packs and a cooler full of meat, all while saving millions of dollars, who am I to say?

I am sure that to some, the idea of castrating deer is better than killing them. And that in itself, seems to be worthy of the cost.